SFF NOTES: Julieta (2016, Dir. Pedro Almodóvar)

Pedro Almodóvar has long played with loose, inventive narrative structures. It is almost his bread and butter (or his bread and milk if we’re being culturally appropriate). His films tend to turn in on themselves, re-situating character motivations with re-visited histories. Sometimes it works (Volver, The Skin I Live In) and sometimes it doesn’t (Bad Education, Talk to Her - and I know I’m in a minority thinking so).

I’d throw Julieta in this second camp. Not because the film, which melds together a collection of three short stories by Canadian writer Alice Munro, gets away from him, just that by the time he reels everything in the impact has dispersed. The film’s rambling over the multiple loves and multiple losses of Julieta Arcos (played with Buñuel-nodding duality by Adriana Ugarte and Emma Suárez) is indulgently listless, drowning in its own melodrama. There’s an emotional masochism here that rears its head early on in a strange encounter on a train, which flings Julieta into the arms of Galician fisherman Xoan (Daniel Grao) and a riptide of barely justified self-doubt.

This inkling of guilt becomes Julieta’s toxic lifeblood and feeds into the concept of independence, dependence and unhealthy emotional addiction that Almodóvar uses to hold his time and actress hopping film together. The bulk of this is focussed on Julieta’s daughter Ava (Inma Cuesta), who is mysteriously MIA. Admittedly, there is some potency in this, yet the disparate settings and time periods impact on the character development and push everything towards the shallows.

Even if Almodóvar doesn’t manage to whip the emotions into a storm, the rest of the senses are more than sated. Production design, as always is impeccably bold, as is Alberto Iglesias’ score. Individual scenes and characters shine, especially Rossy De Palma’s Mrs Danvers inspired housekeeper and a triumphant mid-film visual segue that is almost worth the price of admission in itself.

These little gems lift Julieta above the Almodóvar-by-numbers it could have been. But not by much.

★★★☆

Trailer:

Julieta screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.